The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama[1] is a webcomic starring "a high-flying llama, a sword-swinging [cat], and a rocket as loyal as a cowboy's [horse]."[2] Created by Alex Langley while he was a student at Henderson State University, the comic first appeared in a comic book titled The Workday Comic. For the Workday comics anthology, a spin-off of Scott McCloud's 24-Hour Comics, comics creators each wrote and drew their own eight-page stories in eight hours in April, 2007, on Friday the 13th.[3]

Co-presenting with comics author and scholar Danny Fingeroth (Dazzler, Spider-Man, Superman on the Couch), the creators described the webcomic's evolution as members of a Comics Arts Conference panel at 2008's Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.[4][5]

Contents

The full title of Rocket Llama's debut story in The Workday Comic #1 was "The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama #112: 'Trouble in Paradise'".[6] The story introduced the taciturn hero Rocket Llama and his talkative sidekick, an anthropomorphic cat named Bartholomew Meowsenhausen, who find themselves stranded on an island after a battle with an enemy called Jetpack Dog. Spherical islanders capture them and then challenge them to combat. A villain named Böwser vön Überdog arrives with Jetpack Dog and, in a sudden Star Wars parody, summons a giant robot known as the Super Robot Dog Walker which blasts a volcano to bits. Before it can fire a second blast, Rocket Llama destroys it. The story ends with Böwser tied up and the heroes using the giant robot dog head as a boat to get themselves home, with the promise of the next story to be titled, "Yuck! Yukon!"[7][8]

Whether despite the original story's childlike art or because of it, the Rocket Llama story proved to be the most popular in the 2007 anthology collection of the students' work.[9] After comic artist Stephen R. Bissette, an instructor at the Center for Cartoon Studies best known for his work on Swamp Thing with Alan Moore, read all of the stories in the first volume of The Workday Comic, he remarked, "That llama's gonna stick with me."[10]

Nick Langley redrew the story with a less childlike drawing style in webcomic form for online publication[11] as the flagship title for the website rocketllama.com which grew into an affiliation of websites featuring webcomics, art, entertainment reviews, and scholarly studies of comics.[12] The online story featured a new cover[13] and omitted a one-page gag, a preview for an unrelated Stealth Potato comic, which had appeared as an intermission in the middle of the original story.[14] The original story also appeared online as the comic's "ashcan copy."

The authors present the Rocket Llama stories metafictionally as the world's oldest comic book, established in 1916, which they allegedly rediscovered and are adapting into webcomics. "Deep underground, in an archaic vault we searched until we found the fabled tales. As both the current production team behind The Ongoing Adventures of Rocket Llama and appreciators of such groundbreaking literature, we have taken it upon ourselves to restore these classic issues to a glory more befitting a modern, digital age."[15]

Although every "issue" is presented with panels and screens in the correct order for each story, the issues are presented out of order as if readers were discovering old issues of a classic comic book in a seemingly haphazard order, however they come to find them. After the redrawn number 112's online publication came the serialized #136, "Time Flies When You're on the Run, Part 1," appearing one page at a time on weekdays.[16]